Kara Goucher Pre-Race Q&A

Jan 14, 2012

Image via Lisa Coniglio/PhotoRun

by Alex HutchinsonKara Goucher, 33, has a bronze medal from the 2007 World Championships at 10,000 meters, and set a personal best of 2:24:52 at last year’s windswept Boston Marathon. The 2008 Olympian recently joined coach Jerry Schumacher’s group in Portland, Oregon, which includes Trials favorite Shalane Flanagan.Where do you look for confidence that you can finish in the top three on Saturday morning?Kara Goucher: I’m looking at my last two and a half months of training since I joined Jerry’s group and since I started training with Shalane. It’s just the workouts that I saw Shalane doing when I joined the team ... I had never seen a woman do workouts like that before. And then in the last five or six weeks, I’ve been able to do them with her. So I’m just trying to remember how impressed I was by her when I joined the team, and how I thought I’d never seen a woman train like that, and now I’m like, “I’ve done that too.”Was that demoralizing at first?KG: Yeah. I had a couple of anxiety attacks after workouts. And Shalane and Lisa Uhl, my other teammate, were so nice to me and so encouraging and would tell me it takes time. But I was just blown away. I’m not saying I didn’t work hard before. I did. I worked really, really hard before. But I just had never seen women training like that day in and day out. I remember telling Jerry, “I’m a joke.”What was the biggest difference?KG: Just volume of the workouts. A lot more time on your feet. And it was really overwhelming to me.From your training group, Simon Bairu had to withdraw before the Toronto Marathon last fall, and now Tim Nelson has withdrawn from the Trials. Are you worried that you may have pushed too much and crossed that fine line?KG: No. I mean, training in general is always a fine line. You have to do everything you can do to be as good as you can be, and there is that tipping point. But I feel–you know, honestly, I’m still behind. I was coming from a point of injury when I had five weeks when I ran through an injury and then five weeks of nothing. I didn’t crosstrain; I did nothing for five weeks. So I started way behind. So I feel I’m still on that upswing. I would love to have five more weeks of training, but the date is set in stone.Will you approach the race differently as a result?KG: Absolutely. I will be much more conservative. If I’m so fortunate as to make the team, I’d race much more aggressively in the future. I know what my workouts have been, and I feel really good about them. But I also know that I missed nearly two months of training, and that’s a lot at this level. I didn’t start running again until–I’m embarrassed to admit it, but it was in October.For me it just means being smart, and maybe for once the goal isn’t to win, it is just to be in the top three. I’m not saying I don’t want to win; of course I do. But if there’s a break early on, I’ve had really great workouts, but for a short period of time, and I don’t have the confidence to risk it and roll the dice that early on in the race. For me it’s about, I don’t want to say the time, but I know a time that I’m ready to run, and it’s sticking to those splits. And if there’s a break early on, I just have to let them go and hope that they come back.How fast will the race go?KG: A lot of it depends on how itchy people get in the beginning. I hate predicting things, because it’s so dependent on what people do and how people react, but I think the win will be between 2:22 and 2:24.I can’t control what anyone else can do. In the past, I’ve just kind of gone for it, because either you win Boston or you don’t. But this is really different, because third place gets the same exact ticket to London as first place. It’s not like a shinier ticket, it’s not first-class versus business. It’s the exact same ticket.Will you work with Shalane during the race?KG: Yeah, we both know what each other’s race plans are. But like I said before, a lot of it depends on what other people do. Depending on how the race goes out, we will work together, and if it goes out a different way we won’t work together. We have a race plan from our coach, we know what each other’s race plan is, but we have a lot of leeway with that race plan to react to what we need to react to. And Shalane has had more training than me, so she’s in a different situation than I am.

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